How Bunq protects over 20 million global customers with Sardine
Bunq is a global neobank that provides a flexible way to spend in 16+ currencies without opening separate accounts. Users can manage sub accounts and shared expenses, and even automate financial workflows across other tools. Onboarding takes less than five minutes, which has helped Bunq attract over 20 million users.
As the business expanded, so did the complexity of fraud threats. With limited automation and a rule engine that required rules to be hard-coded, it would take weeks to adjust or deploy new rules. Steph Rios Bigal, Bunq’s Product Owner for Fraud Prevention, recognized quickly that they needed to improve their tooling if they wanted to keep up with modern scams.
“Our issue before was speed,” said Bunq. “If we saw a fraud trend that we wanted to tackle,we had to write a proposal, submit it for review, wait for engineering to schedule the work, and try to get it prioritized. The whole process could take us weeks.”
"By the time we rolled out a new rule, fraudsters had already moved on to the next scam. They were adapting faster than we could respond."
[author]- Steph Rios, Product Owner for Fraud Prevention, Bunq[/author]
Sardine stood out as an end-to-end solution
Steph started with a clear vision for her team: “We’re here to ensure that criminals cannot profit from our platform.” To meet that goal, she decided to look for a solution that could replace their hard-coded rules and give her team better control over fraud responses.
Bunq evaluated several major vendors and selected Sardine. “Meetings with Sardine were concise and effective, proving to be a good fit for Bunq’s culture,” said Bunq. “With Sardine, we would explain a problem, and they would outline how to use their solution to fix it.”
Bunq had a long list of hard and soft requirements, including behavioral analytics, phone risk scoring, a no-code rule builder, backtesting, machine learning, and case management. After some evaluation, Sardine’s end-to-end solution stood out as the winner to solve both their fraud and AML needs. She liked that it gave her team the autonomy to identify a threat, create and test a rule, then deploy it without relying on engineering.
"Our team had a list of hard requirements across fraud and AML, and Sardine met them all. We chose Sardine because they offered a complete solution that aligned with how we needed to work."
[author]- Steph Rios, Product Owner for Fraud Prevention, Bunq[/author]
Sardine exceeds Bunq’s expectations on all major risk metrics
Bunq’s engineering team was able to integrate Sardine relatively quickly, freeing them up to focus on other priorities. The fraud team saw a “massive” reduction of risk after implementing Sardine across their customer lifecycle, as well as a nice lift in accuracy.
By taking advantage of Sardine’s platform, Bunq was able to achieve:
[three-numbers-below]
- 82%
reduction in fraud - 95%
less fraud victims - 4X
fewer false positives
Bunq stops criminals in the act with Sardine
Bunq’s fraud analysis team can now identify, respond, and proactively block threats themselves without relying on engineering teams to write hard-coded rules. The process came in handy at a very critical time for Bunq. “It was ten at night, and we were all at a holiday party when we discovered a fraud ring attack,” said Bunq. The team opened up a laptop on a table and launched Sardine’s dashboard. Within minutes, they identified what the fraudsters were doing and deployed a rule to stop the attack in progress.
“Sardine’s platform helped us instantly detect the threat, trace the scam across accounts and devices, and shut it down on the spot. We went from alert to resolution in under 20 minutes.”
[author]- Steph Rios, Product Owner for Fraud Prevention, Bunq[/author]
An optimistic future for Bunq
The Bunq team will continually innovate with Sardine to protect the integrity of their platform. The team already is benefitting from Sardine’s risk platform, and are considering AI transaction filtering using their own data as well. Bunq emphasized how much freedom their team has gained from Sardine, enabling them to be proactive and adapt to threats in real-time.